


skeleton key

by cryptidgay



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Archivist Sasha James, Bisexual Sasha James, F/F, Haircuts, Lesbian Melanie King, Not!Tim, Spoilers Through Season 04, Tags to be updated as fic updates!, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:20:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24062758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay
Summary: There’s a reason Sasha'd taken a job in artefact storage. Burning curiosity lies at the heart of her, locked behind her ribcage a willingness to do and seek andlearnat all costs.(She is, as it turns out, an excellent Archivist.)
Relationships: Sasha James & Tim Stoker, Sasha James/Melanie King, Sasha James/Melanie King/Georgie Barker (eventual), Tim Stoker/Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood (background)
Comments: 66
Kudos: 141





	1. i showed you a body like a cluttered garage

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to archivist sasha au!
> 
>  **IMPORTANT NOTE:** hi! magnus archives hyperfixation has abandoned me swiftly and without mercy, and as such, this fic is _unfinished_. maybe i'll go back and finish it at some point, but odds are that i won't. apologies to anyone who was keeping up with it. 
> 
> as it is right now, it ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger; if this won't bother you, i think there's some decent content in what's posted right now to make it worth reading even in its unfinished state. if the cliffhanger will bother you, check out some of my other fics!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warnings:** dead bodies, mention of police.
> 
>  **recommended listening:** [show you a body](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ClE6HWVjQ4) by haley heynderickx.

_ Summer 2015. _

Sasha James has been head archivist of the Magnus Institute for two weeks when she discovers the body of her predecessor.

She wasn’t looking for a body — but she must have been looking for something. Why else would she venture under the Institute? It’s horrid enough to spend time in the above-ground segments of the Institute as she works; she’s been there three years now, between practical research, her former assistant position under Gertrude’s watchful eye, and her new promotion, and the place gives her the shivers.

The building is wrong. Hollow-boned, malicious: she feels eyes on the back of her head and she can never look enough places, never keep an eye on as many exits as she wishes to.

There’s a heavy stapler on top of her desk and a letter opener in a desk drawer. A proper knife in her jacket pocket, mace on her keychain; breadcrumb gifts from a hovering mother who had  _ hated _ the idea of her only daughter moving to London defenseless. No matter how many in-a-pinch weapons she has in arm’s reach, that  _ watched _ feeling persists — but it helps, knowing that if the walls close in she can fight her way out.

It doesn’t help  _ enough. _

The irrational paranoia is something she can deal with; Sasha has been a woman in academia for long enough to learn to cope with eyes on her. When her office is empty and the feeling fails to leave, when she cannot sleep at night for the weight of it, it becomes harder to ignore — a pea hidden under a mattress, and she, tossing and turning.

It’s the unavoidable truth of it that bothers her. She can chalk a lot up to new-job stressors, but there’s the chaos of papers to consider, Gertrude’s disappearance,  _ missing in the line of duty _ .

“I don’t envy you,” Jon had said, dropping off newly-completed research and eyeing the sky-high stacks of statements surrounding her pre-coffee stained desk. “Two hundred years of files  _ and _ an incompetent predecessor without a proper filing system? You’ve got your work cut out, Sasha.”

Sasha’d laughed.

Because Jon hadn’t  _ known _ Gertrude. If he had, she’s positive incompetent is the last word he’d use to describe her, and she cannot quite explain the humor there, especially when Jon is giving her that face — the one that says he’s about to snap if she doesn’t stop her giggling or explain the joke, explain that she isn’t laughing at his expense, it’s just… funny. She’d thanked him for the research and sent him off on his way, offered him an early lunch break she knows he’s unlikely to take.

Sasha, of course, has not changed Gertrude’s filing one bit.

It makes it difficult to find what she’s looking for, papers everywhere like this and the already-faint light from the buzzing overhead lamps bouncing off the haphazard stacks and casting shadows everywhere, but she cannot move a single thing until she finds  _ answers _ . As far as Sasha is concerned, the Archives are an active crime scene. Anything moved out of place is tampered evidence. She stays late and she comes in early and she reads only so many statements as come in fresh — nothing that’ll require her digging through the manilla folders of looseleaf piled on every flat surface.

Sitting still and doing her job was never an option. Not when there is so much still unknown, and all the mysteries loom over her like some terrible storybook beast.

She sets research to the side and, instead, analyzes every inch of the room she now lays claim to. Every dead spider on the high windowsills that just hardly let her glimpse sunlight, swept away. Every concerningly dust-free book on the bookshelves is taken out, shaken to see if anything falls out. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, but she’s absolutely positive it will make itself known.

It’s three days into the search that she finds the tunnels.

Her footsteps seem to sink under the wood instead of bouncing off, and there’s scraping along the edges — she pries up an out-of-place square and finds the spot a key should go, but of course none of hers fit. It looks like it’d suit an old ornate skeleton key. The small silver-and-gold keys and her Archives keycard taunt her where they hang from her pocket; they’re laughably incorrect, here.

(It’s an irrational thought, and she knows that as she thinks it, but some part of her says she  _ should _ have been given this key. It should be a test of her curiosity, how far she is willing to go to reach a given end — Bluebeard’s castle and dead wives behind doorways, waifish young women promising not to use the final forbidden key. Pandora and etcetera.

But Elias is no Bluebeard, and certainly he hadn’t even known about the trap door in the Archives when he’d given her her fresh ring of office keys for “those stubborn areas that refuse to wire to the new electric keycards — we  _ are _ working on them, but in the meantime, these may be of use.”)

For lack of keys, she brings a crowbar to work the next day, hidden in the bottom of her purse. With the glow of her phone’s torch in her hand and her knife heavy in her pocket, she descends.

These things come in threes, and as such, it’s the third trip down that she finds the body.

She’s used enough to the twisting-turning nature of the underground by then, spent enough endless hours lost in its depths the first two times; she’s brought a rope and tethered it to the ladder entrace, unspooled it between her fingers as she makes her way through. She is Gretel, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to find her way home. She is Sasha, unwilling to let a mystery stay unknown.

(There’s a reason she’d taken a job in artefact storage. Burning curiosity lies at the heart of her, locked behind her ribcage a willingness to  _ do _ and  _ seek _ and  _ learn _ at all costs.)

(She is, as it turns out, an excellent Archivist.)

The trip back up aboveground isn’t one she remembers. She emerges from the tunnels with a scraped-up knee and a half-corrupted photo on her phone —  _ evidence _ , because she’d known even in the midst of panic that if the body were moved before the police arrived nobody would believe her without proof. She’s not looking to be the Archivist who cried wolf.

The camera flash had lit up that pressing darkness, and for a moment she’d been positive it had glinted off several sets of eyes around her, but when she’d swept the trembling torchlight around the room there’s only been blank dirty walls, boxes of tapes, and the old woman’s corpse.

Gertrude’s eyes, at least, were closed.

It’s near-midnight when she emerges and the Institute is empty but for Sasha and the dead woman below. The police are quick to appear, and she leads them along her rope-path to a long-cold body that is, thankfully, still present.

They let her leave after an hour.

(“Stay out of these tunnels,” one of the cops tells her. A woman with dark skin and sharp eyes who hadn’t so much as flinched at the dead body putrifying in the underground corridors. Sasha can only assume she’s seen worse, and her revulsion at the concept wars with her curiosity at what  _ worse _ means. “Never know who’s in these kinds of places.”

Sasha pastes a nervous-but-agreeable smile on her face, agrees, and makes plans to journey back to the bottom of the Institute the moment the police stop swarming.

The mystery, after all, hasn’t been solved. Hasn’t even begun, really. Gertrude’s got bullet holes in her chest and dried-black blood on her nice maroon scarf. She’d never looked quite peaceful when Sasha’d known her, not the way one may expect an old woman in a glorified librarian’s position to look — there’d been a glint in her eye, always, plans spinning themselves into gold somewhere just beneath the surface of her. She hadn’t looked peaceful in death, either, and Sasha’s been left with more questions than ever.

She aches with the lack of answers.)

By the time Sasha’s home, it’s well past two in the morning, and she’s shaking with a catastrophic mixture of unspent adrenaline and sheer nerves. It isn’t unusual for her to be home late; more often than not, she’s stuck waiting a half hour for the sparsely-running night tube, but she always goes home, cannot  _ stand _ the thought of being within the Institute’s walls with her guard down. To sleep in a place is to trust it with your unconscious body, and she doesn’t even trust the Archives to protect her while awake.

Her flat is hardly perfect, but it is  _ hers _ , framed art picked up from street fairs on her walls and piled-up sweaters on the desk chair she hasn’t used as anything but storage in years. She knows every entrance and exit and exactly how long it would take her to flee down the three flights of her fire escape if she needed to.

In a few hours, she’ll be expected back at the Institute. She still has  _ work _ to do tomorrow; so long as the police haven’t roped off her office for its entrance to the tunnels, she wants — no, needs to dig into whatever statements Gertrude’d been working on prior to her death. Her murder.

Back in artefact storage, she’d stood behind mirrored glass and watched, wide-eyed but unmoving, as one of the other researches was devoured by a dusty hope chest so thoroughly she no longer remembers their name.

It had still taken her two months to ask for a transfer. To weigh her curiosity against her life.

It isn’t a question, whether or not she’ll return to work tomorrow.

In her flat, she stares at herself in the fogged-up mirror, damp hair hanging down to her shoulderblades. It had taken ages to wash the grime from the tunnels off of her skin, and she’s exhausted but cannot fathom sleeping. Instead, she looks. It isn’t her first time seeing a body; she’d been to two emotionally distant grandparents’ funerals by the time she hit high school, and her three months in practical research had shown her far more, to the point where she isn’t even sure why the Institute is allowed to keep that division. The turnover rate is high, but the mortality rate is higher. Gertrude is the only one among the deceased who she’s known so well before seeing — stumbling across — searching for and  _ finding _ her corpse.

She doesn’t look any different for the experience. She looks into her own eyes, and against all odds, the same Sasha stares back.

Her hands are trembling. When did they begin shaking; when she found the body? No, her photograph was glitched around the edges but clear. When she’d followed her woven trail back to the Archives, surfacing from that trap door with the gasp of a long-submerged deep sea diver? When she’d sat on the train, perhaps, and firmly refused to panic, even as a stumbling-drunk man across the carriage had begun shouting and hadn’t stopped until she’d hastily moved to the next car, and even then, had continued on, muted shouting audible all the way home?

No. Her hands had been still as she’d fished her keys from her pocket, and only once she’d entered the safety of familiar walls had she let them free, hummingbird-fluttering at her sides.

She lifts the scissors from her medicine cabinet. Needs a change. Needs something  _ hers _ , something she has control over, when so much of her circumstance is a Pandora’s box of impossible mystery.

In the morning, the Institute will be aflutter with police questioning and the cacophony of a murder in their midst — they will be wondering and pointing fingers and fearing at varying volumes and far too busy to notice her hair’s only to her shoulders, not curled halfway down her back. The bleached-pink strands in her sink make her feel better even so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **up next:** something strange.


	2. watch your reflection in the cases as you pass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sasha,” the thing that is not Tim says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warnings:** violence (not too graphic), stranger-typical memory alteration, panic attack.
> 
> **recommended listening:** [kites](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5arwKfkT1M) by dessa, [going to monaco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smF4KP8cfFQ&list=PLq1UqWidVoSWhPFX7hLuzoFOjdggdrEye&index=254) by the mountain goats.

_ Spring 2016. _

Sasha has dealt with plenty of injuries in her time, has corkscrewed worms from her own skin and bandaged herself afterwards and done the same for her friends with unshaking hands — calm in a crisis, that’s her, only panicking behind the sanctuary of closed doors. She knows, then, exactly what the rosepetal fall of blood  _ should _ feel like.

She knows that when she takes a dull crowbar to the head of a thing that is not Tim, it isn’t blood that had stained her clothes. Not the right consistency, sourslick and inky and nauseating to even look at, much less touch, splattered as it is against her skin.

Alone but for the thing that is not her best friend, her heart feels ready to claw its way out from her ribcage and explode into ash on the floor. Her lungs ache and she cannot get enough air into them, can’t exhale without feeling a scream bubble up. It’s pushed back.

“Sasha,” the thing that is not Tim says, smiling through its wounds with too many teeth, lips stretched gruesomely wide and every single too-sharp tooth visible, skeleton-grinning and refusing to fall.

“Sasha,” it says again. She recognizes it, this time, for what it is: a taunt.

Her hands tremble, but they’re white-knuckled around the crowbar, and she keeps going until the distorted form in front of her crumples, and then more, until it looks neither like her own memory of Tim or the polaroid photo of the real Tim she’d unearthed. Twisted and bloodied and  _ wrong _ in every conceivable way.

More than anything, Sasha wants to cry.

But Gertrude Robinson would not cry, and Sasha has gotten in the habit of asking herself at every junction:  _ what would Gertrude do? _ She’d known the woman only well enough to know she wasn’t what she seemed, but not nearly to the level of familiarity required to see what lay beyond that guise, doddering and cardigan-bound. Gertrude had had a spark of sharp intelligence buried in the wrinkles around her eyes. A brutal efficiency to her.

Sasha slumps heavily to the ground beside the not-body, bloodstained hands resting on her forehead and smearing something foul there.  _ What would Gertrude do? _

Had Gertrude ever been through this? Her best friend, the person she had trusted more than anyone else in the world, changing beneath her nose? Shifting into another  _ thing _ entirely while she had watched unaware? Had Gertrude lost people? She must have, Sasha thinks. The position of Archivist, she is quickly learning, requires more sacrifice and bloodshed than either of them had ever signed up for.

Had Gertrude ever found an old recording of a familiar voice and had to wrack her mind, unpuzzle locked-away memories into something that made sense, to recognize her stolen best friend? Had Gertrude trusted anyone enough to care if they were taken from her?

What would Gertrude do?

She would deal with the problem.

Sasha deals with the problem.

She hasn’t been to the tunnels since finding Gertrude, and the thought of those labyrinthine halls made into yet another locked-up tomb sends a shudder down her spine, but the panicked shakiness of even imagining explaining the body to anybody is so much worse. So she drags the thing-that-was-never-Tim into its depths. It is, she notes with the distance that comes only with a mind so entirely overwhelmed by circumstance that it processes facts with a cold clarity, lighter than a body its size should be. The not-Tim is only a few inches shorter than Sasha, but she’d always found herself looking up when talking to him, having to course-correct her wayward gaze halfway through a sentence. The eyes, ever-knowing, remembered what the stranger had done its best to erase.

The real Tim, she thinks, had been taller.

It’s not that her memories have crystalized into clarity with its death — looking back feels like a flashlight beam bouncing off fog, like shapes through a kaleidoscope, half-visible but only for a moment. The shape of it is there through the haze, but the details don’t follow. A part of her mind is barred from her.

But she remembers standing on tiptoes to press a kiss to his cheek, laughing as he’d walked around with a lipstick-print stain for the rest of the day.

She may not be able to picture his face, but she remembers leaning her head against his shoulder, drunk and sleep-hazy and smiling.

The not-Tim had been polite but distant. For all she and Martin and even  _ Jon _ had pleaded with him to join them for after-work drinks, he’d always shaken his head, said he had other plans, refused to elaborate.  _ Tim’s always been a private person _ , Martin’d said with a shrug, and it’d caught on the edges of her brain like a bur in a wool sweater, edges pointing and scratching until she could no longer ignore its knife-sharpness.

It had taken her three months, even so, to let her hand lead her to the relevant statements, hovering over stacks of pages like a planchette on a dusty ouija board.

When she’s walked far enough for her body to struggle keeping up the dead thing’s meager weight, she dumps it. A side room off a side room off a side room, the unmappable maze of the place protecting her from consequence, from retribution. Maybe whoever’s Archivist after her will find it.

She can’t think about it right now. Someone finding it, the way she’d found Gertrude. Instead of a mystery with answers, gaining all the more questions for their trouble: the sight of it all bubblegum-stretched arms and still-grinning mouth, more skeletal than gleeful.

It isn’t wrong the way Michael was wrong, purposefully twisting whenever Sasha turned her head, laughing like a migraine in the corners of her eyes. It’s wrong in a way that feels like it’d tried to put itself together right and failed.

Sasha can’t get out of the room quickly enough.

It’s only when she leaves, slamming the door behind her, that she realizes she hadn’t thought to bring a rope to guide her way home, just her phone flashlight in her pocket and the not-blood staining everything. It’s crushingly dark, moreso than she recalls from her previous journeys into the depths, and exhaustion gives way once more to panic as she fumbles to turn on the torch, grips her phone tight in one hand and the stained-black crowbar in the other as her clumsy feet follow the trail of blood. She tries to smear it into the dirt as she goes. She tries to quiet her breathing from its crescendoing heft; close the door on her panic until it floods out of the cracks in the wood.

She’ll need to scrub the floors of her office. Lock the door and make sure nobody sees the mess she’s left — send Jon and Martin home for the day, if they haven’t already left, explain to them tomorrow and pray they’ll understand. She’ll need to get rid of the crowbar, somehow. It may not be blood coating it, but how will that hold up in a murder investigation? Would a DNA test reveal it as Tim’s, despite the warped form of its source?

She makes it back to her office before collapsing against the floor, tear tracks down her cheeks and heart buried somewhere deep in the maze below.

Nobody knocks on the Archives door. She’ll be thankful for that when she can think straight again. Jon and Martin, she thinks, must have gone home; by the time her lungs tire of hyperventilating and even out into a half-steady rhythm, the clock reads well past eight. How long had she spent in the tunnels? How long on the floor leaned against her desk, trying not to give into the urge to scream?

After a time, she drags herself off the floor and cleans up the blood from the tiles. Changes into her spare set of clothes, tucks the dirtied ones behind three layers of plastic bags to wash over and over again when she gets home and eventually discard, unable to get the stains out. But it’s still under her nails. It’s still caught in her  _ hair _ and no matter how much she scrubs at it in the bathroom sink it won’t come out, just knots in her curls like stubborn gum.

One hand steadies her exhaustion-slumped frame against the cold sink. The other cuts messy swaths across her hair, any bit that’s too tangled up in unblood gone, piling up beneath her.

It looks awful. It’s absolutely terrible, and she has the sharp-stark thought that if Tim were here — the real Tim, her best friend — he’d help her even it out. Tim would make jokes about how he’d considered a career in hairdressing and isn’t that good for her, how he’d been giving himself haircuts since he was a teenager and it really was about time he branched out to others, how she could  _ definitely _ rock the mullet look, c’mon Sash, give it a  _ try _ , you’ve got it halfway there already —

Sasha only realizes she's crying when her vision clouds too much to see her sloppy reflection in the mirror. How do you miss someone you can’t even remember? How do you mourn someone who’s been gone for so much longer than you’d noticed?

Her hair ends up choppy around the tips of her ears, shorter than it’s ever been, and she sweeps the bloodstained strands into the toilet and resolutely ignores the way the sound of the flush makes her jump.

—————

“Fuck off,” Martin says. All dinnerplate eyes and a begging to disbelieve.

“Sasha, that’s…” Jon says, and Sasha can  _ see _ the word  _ impossible _ on the tip of his tongue, getting trapped somewhere behind his teeth. It isn’t impossible, and they both know it; Sasha with polaroids splayed out on the desk and Jon with wormscars from something that should, by all rights, not have existed, something that must have turned the corner on his tired skepticism.

She’d started with the old tapes of Tim’s voice. Then the polaroids Martin’d taken when they’d all gone out to celebrate surviving their first week in the institute underbelly, nearly a year ago, now. The evidence is there.

They must have noticed that Tim hadn’t shown up to work this morning.

“I dealt with it,” Sasha says. It’s the kindest way she can put it. She’d done what she had to do, after all, and nobody can fault her for that — not Jon, not Martin, not Tim, wherever that thing had put him when it’d taken his life and left an outline in her mind where a friend should be. A bitter smile slips across her face. She’d done what she had to.

There’s a furrow in Jon’s brow halfway between trepidation and fear, and she realizes all at once that it is aimed at  _ her _ . Sasha thins her lips into a straight line. Apologetic. She isn’t about to beg forgiveness for her actions, but the thought of scaring her coworkers — her  _ friends _ — twists something awful in her stomach. They may never have been as close as she and Tim, but they’re all she has left, and she’s going to keep them safe.

“I’m going to get him back,” she promises.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **up next:** a flower, a tape, and a book.


	3. bet on losing dogs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If you’re listening to this, it means I’m dead,” Gertrude’s voice says in her ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **recommended listening:** [palace](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2ylxUkKv98) by dessa.

It’s mid-April and Melanie King tracks in flower petals from the tree out front, the kind that are pink and beautiful and cloud-light until they become soggy and trod-upon. One’s stuck in the laces of her boots. Another’s trapped in her hair, pale petals on harsh blue. Sasha doesn’t point it out, but she does notice.

She notices a lot, these days.

She notices the way Melanie squints at the tape recorder on the desk, a snort working its way out, and Sasha explains herself without needing to be asked: “The true statements don’t work with digital microphones. I know it’s old fashioned, but this way you won’t have to repeat your story when we play it back and find it’s oh-so-mysteriously glitched itself beyond recognition.”

“And you’re so sure my story’ll be true?” Melanie says. She’s got a brave face that’s more used to wearing a sneer than a smile, scaring off skeptics and forging a pathway for herself no matter the cost, but Sasha sees the doubt beneath. The worry of not being believed. It’s a familiar expression.

“I don’t think you’d be here if it wasn’t,” Sasha says, keeping her voice soft but staying far away from the boundaries of  _ patronizing _ . “You’d be talking into a camera for an audience, not to me.”

Melanie considers this. She looks like she wants to deny it, but realizes before the words leave her mouth that it’d be pointless, that not everything needs a contrary response.

She tells her story.

(Sasha considers herself a nice enough person, but she’s never really understood when people describe the sort of empathy that chokes them from the inside —  _ I feel what you’re feeling _ has always felt, to her, a self-aggrandizing mask, inherently untrue. Sympathy is one thing, but to lay claim to another person’s pain or joy is another. It’s overstepping, she thinks. A boundary between hearts that shouldn’t be crossed.

It’s different with statements. She feels Melanie’s fear as if it’s her own, and though her face remains stoic she can  _ see _ staplerskin and shadows.)

“I believe you,” Sasha says the moment the statement ends, tape recorder whirring faintly against the wood of her desk as if to agree. “I mean, I’d be a right asshole not to believe you, yeah? Nobody’d make that up.”

“Oh,” Melanie says. “Thank you.” She sounds surprised to mean it.

“You don’t have to — it’s fine. I mean. I’ve seen… I’ve seen enough things here to make any hardened skeptic change their tune, you know? And I was never much of a skeptic to begin with. Things I’d absolutely believe capable of peeling and stapling themselves back together if it suited them, horrific as it is.”

“Jesus, alright.” Melanie pauses like she’ll leave it at that, chews on her lip for a moment. Sasha can see the gears turning as she weighs her hesitance to speak the words and her need for answers. “So there’s others out there, like Sarah Baldwin?”

Sasha thinks about not-blood and not-friends and her months-old still-smoldering need to figure out a way to reverse it all. A shiver runs through her without her permission. “Yeah,” she says, some of her usual lightness failing her, the word dropping into her stomach like a stone. “I know it isn’t quite fair, you just spilling your whole story and me not doing the same in return, but, well. I think you’d have to get a few drinks in me before I’d be anywhere  _ near _ ready to tell that one.”

“Fair enough,” says Melanie with the understanding of someone who has seen horrors of her own. Someone with stories to tell. Someone who’d prefer hiding those stories, at least until she finds someone who’s ready to listen properly.

In a moment of shockingly intense bravery, Sasha smiles, tilts her head. She thinks about flower blossoms trapped in boot laces and she thinks about just how long it’s been since she’s really talked to anyone. Melanie’s hair looks soft. She wonders for a selfish moment what it’d feel like to touch it, blue strands between her fingers. How might Melanie react if Sasha reached out and plucked that flower from her hair, tucked it behind her ear with  _ purpose _ rather than haphazardly thrown there by nature?

“How’s today?”

“Today?”

“For drinks. I’m out of here in a few hours? Honestly, things are weird enough here that I don’t know how much the whole nine-to-five schedule  _ matters _ anymore, but the steady routine’s nice.”

Melanie is quiet for long enough Sasha nearly regrets the question, but just before Sasha can speak again to take it back, she nods. Smiles like it’s a trick, somehow, but like she doesn’t want to see the beartrap before it locks around her ankle. “Yeah. Sure, that sounds great.”

“Come by around five, then,” Sasha says. She’s grinning for the first time in who-knows-how-long — before Tim’d been taken, she thinks, though even before then she’d been dealing with Prentiss, with Gertrude’s body, with the stress of a promotion. It’s been a long, long time. “Bonus points if you’ve got a good haunted pub around here. I  _ know _ you’ve covered them on your show, and I could do with a nice ghost story that’s unlikely to actually try and kill us.”

—————

_ Summer 2016. _

There’s a false bottom in one of the Archivist’s desk drawers.

Because of course there is, because Sasha should’ve looked for this much sooner than a year-and-change into the job, should’ve found it while she was scouring every inch of the office for clues  _ months _ ago. She feels unforgivably stupid for not noticing it sooner.

As it is, it takes her coffee spilling all over the drawer’s contents, forcing her to clear out stained stacks of paper and hair clips and pencils already half-fed to sharpeners. Once the drawer is empty, she can see the bottom doesn’t line up with the edges perfectly. Her fingers catch against the back of it, and she slides it out, and inside —

There’s a single tape.

The label on it reads  _ 20 March 2015 _ in Gertrude’s neat capital letters, and Sasha pushes it into a tape deck and plugs in her headphones before she can think about her actions, cradling the recording in her palms like it contains the answers to the universe. She isn’t entirely sure it  _ doesn’t _ . With all the knowledge Gertrude’d held, such a thing no longer seems improbable.

“If you’re listening to this, it means I’m dead,” Gertrude’s voice says in her ears.

—————

The next morning, Sasha ventures back into the tunnels, flashlight in hand and recorder in pocket and boltcutter determination gripping her heart. Gertrude’s tape was — was  _ fine _ , all things considered, but its advice was not nearly as useful to her now as it would have been a year ago.

The bit that was never meant to be recorded, though — that holds her interest.

Sasha has never heard the man’s voice, but the name Jurgen has appeared in more than enough statements to be immediately recognizable. Even before the days of statements, it had been spoken like a curse from the mouths of her coworkers in practical research, especially those unlucky few who’d been tasked with actually  _ reading _ the books from his horrid library, those who looked positively haunted whenever he’d been brought up. She remembers Catherine, who’d quit after a month, had avoided even everyday books after reading from a Leitner. She’d startled when she’d seen Sasha flipping through an old Nancy Drew hardcover in the breakroom.

The tunnels are as unfriendly as ever. Her feet kick up dustclouds the moment they touch ground, and there’s a sharp turn to the right just below the ladder that she doesn’t remember from her last journey down. It’s been months, but she knows she remembers a narrow-straight hallway, claustrophobic enough that her stretched-out fingertips would hit the old brick walls.

Today, it’s a right-angle turn and wide passageways.

She questions it but doesn’t stop to investigate. She observes and moves on with a heavy purpose — there’s no time to split into side-queries, not now, and the proof that the tunnels are  _ wrong _ is something that can be filed into her ever-growing list of peculiarities and sorted through later.

Sasha stops at a crossroads. She has not brought a rope with her to guide the way home, but there’s a compass-arrow in her bones pointing back towards the Archives, and she’s halfway confident she can figure it out. That, too, is not the most important question at the moment.

Deep breath.

“I know you’re down here.”

Bravado is everything, and she’s making a performance of her bravery, projecting her voice down the branching hallways with all the force in her lungs. Hopefully it distracts from her sweating palms.

“My name is Sasha James. I’m the Archivist. Gertrude is dead, and she chose me as her replacement. You knew her. I know you knew her.”

The sound of her voice doesn’t bounce off the walls the way it should; it dulls, as if in a deep cave system where even light cannot penetrate more than a few feet. That total, utter darkness; that obscene lack of silence that seems, by right, like it should exist in such blackness. It drops to the dirt floor several feet away, like her syllables could kick up their own clouds of filthy ground.

She feels, against all odds, like someone is listening anyways.

“Jurgen Leitner, if you’re still down here, I have some questions for you.”

—————

Sasha climbs out of the tunnels with a stack of books, handled with sweatersleeves pulled over her hands and intense caution, like she’s carrying a wild snarling beast and not a collection of felled trees. Careful. Steady.

Her heartbeat pounds beneath every inch of her skin, but she refuses to show her fear. Every instinct in her screams that these books are watching, are waiting for her to open them, are  _ hungry _ .

Hubris is dangerous, she’s well aware. It isn’t like it’s a  _ secret _ here, what happens to the people who use these books. The ones who go in blind, the ones who do it purposefully, seeking power: neither fare very well. Whether or not you know what you’re digging for yourself, a grave is a grave, and a person can only have so much dirt piled atop them before they succumb to it.

She knows very well what artifacts like this can do to those who wield them.

Leitner had told her he had very few of the books left — some of them are in the Institute’s artifact storage, but she isn’t keen to return there. Fewer, still, dealing with the Stranger. She’d taken whatever answers he could give, lit flashlight-under-chin like a kid at a campfire:  _ on a dark and stormy night, the Archivist took the magic-cursed-haunted books into her office, and… _ And.

Well, she doesn’t know what comes next yet, does she?

She knows what she  _ hopes _ for. It’s difficult, Leitner said and her statements confirm, to undo something that one of the powers has touched. Near impossible to pull a person back from that. What the not-Tim had done to Tim… she doesn’t know and cannot imagine, what a thing like that would be capable of. If it could rewrite her memories, convince every single person in the world that it had always been Tim Stoker, what could it do to its victims? How thoroughly erased might he be?

The books are laid out on the floor. She puts on plastic gloves before touching any of their pages, keeps a recording running as a just-in-case, as evidence. Proof of existence.

Gertrude had called her a ritual. Had talked about the cost of being Archivist, the price it would demand from Sasha.

Sasha has been having nightmares for months — not the ordinary kind that have plagued her since childhood, night terrors from which she’d wake up with a scream in her throat and worried parents trying to shake them away above, but nightmares of statements, nightmares in which she  _ knows _ the unfortunate souls present in them are truly there, not mere imagination. The dream is just as inescapable from the other side of the room, seeing only Sasha’s eyes in the darkness, watching, watching, watching, as is her job. The weight of the world is on her shoulders, but what is a world without the people in it?

Sasha may be diving into something she doesn’t understand, but she  _ will _ . She’s seen monsters. If it takes becoming one to protect  _ her people _ , she will do so without hesitation and with eyes wide open.

Perhaps, she thinks, being a monster isn’t so bad, in the end. If it gives her the power to do this. There is something in this world beyond her perception, but soon she will be able to  _ see _ all of it, she is sure. What could be wrong about that?

If it comes with a price, she will pay it. She’s sure it will. The thought does not frighten her.

She flips through the pages and she brings her best friend back from the dead.

—————

“August tenth, 2016. Documentation of using an untitled Leitner in an attempt to bring Timothy Stoker back from the Stranger.” Sasha takes an achingly deep breath, sets the recorder down. A thrill down her spine:  _ she is doing this, and it will work. _ It has to.

“Recorded live by Sasha James, the Archivist. Recording begins.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **up next:** the same, but different.


	4. we are nobody else

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim is back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **recommended listening:** [it will come back](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMhZ18EmlFA) by hozier, [we are nobody else](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RxkmagIBBI) by lady lamb.
> 
> **content warnings:** panic attack, the aftermath of trauma, uncomfortable conversations. this one's sad.

Tim is back.

Sasha knows it’s him from the polaroids, from the tapes, from the way her chin fits against his shoulder when she wraps her arms around him and doesn’t let go for a full ten minutes, from the way both of them are trembling when she finally pulls away. It is without a shadow of a doubt that she looks at the man who’d come stumbling out of the old researchers’ bullpen and thinks  _ yes, this is him, this is my best friend _ .

Her memories don’t quite agree with her logic. She can superimpose this Tim onto the one who’d walked in his shoes and worn his tacky button-downs for months, can almost,  _ almost _ see him clearly as he stands in front of her. But it wavers.

She pulls away too soon. Looks at him with the full weight of her sight: it’s more, now, than it was. Heavier. Her gaze has a static-electricity power to it, and could send a shock through anyone unfortunate to grow close enough.

It  _ is _ him. She knows this.

He’s different.

Not Stranger-different — her eyes are wide open to any tricks that may come with his return, and she records tapes and takes photos like the old-fashioned technology is her new religion, like she worships the physicality of those memories — but different nonetheless.

Angrier.

It isn’t that she doesn’t understand it.  _ Jesus _ , this is the same thing that took Danny, and she’s known about that since… before she’d become Archivist, at the very least. With the not-Tim’s features a vellum cloud over her memories, it’s difficult to place specific conversations: the not-Tim probably never  _ had _ a brother named Danny, she thinks, and certainly never watched the horrors Tim had seen. 

(Would’ve reveled in it, if it did. She wonders how it’d thought about claiming someone who’d so narrowly avoided being taken by the Circus that first time. If it had been a victory. If it will seek revenge for her stealing away its  _ prize. _

Let it, she thinks. She isn’t quite unafraid, but she is brave despite the fear. And fear lurks so everpresently by now that it’s almost background noise.)

The Stranger is responsible for the loss of the most important person in Tim’s life, and now nearly a  _ year _ of his own life, gone. Sasha sees the way the others look at him. Their sight, it seems, has not cleared even the modicum hers has: Jon’d asked Sasha if she’d hired someone new to take Tim’s place, first day Tim was back, before she’d had a chance to explain. (He’d had a furrow in his brow as he asked, a twist to his lips, like he was betrayed by the very thought of Tim being so easily replaceable. The irony of it tasted bitter in her mouth.)

I-do-not-know-you has stolen so much of Tim’s life in one way or the other.

It isn’t that Sasha faults him for it. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, but — she doesn’t remember him this full of rage, and she can’t quite figure out where to put it as it spills out from him. It bubbles over, and she has nowhere to set it down. 

And there’s always that question under all of it: is this really new, or are her memories still so warped to forget such a thing?

It would be one thing — tragic, but understandable, in the end — if this had happened before Sasha became Archivist. If she had not had the tools with which to see what had changed, she couldn’t blame herself for missing it, could she?

But she’d had the whole Archives at her disposal and a growing sight greater than any she’d ever possessed. (She means that both figuratively and literally. Sasha hardly ever needs her glasses anymore, and they sit on her bedside table collecting dust. She’s not sure how long they’ve been there.) It had still taken her months and months to notice he’d been replaced.

What if one of the others had been swapped? Jon, or Martin, or someone outside the Archives? Have Rosie’s smiles from her place behind the reception desk always been so bright, and could that cheer be faked? Amal at the library help desk, were they always so distant?

Every face she sees is analyzed, but she comes up with no clues in either direction. Tim, Jon, and Martin, at least, she can be sure of: she has the polaroids, can hold them up against her memory any time she begins to doubt.

But she doesn’t know any of them nearly as well as she knows Tim.

Martin’s friendly, knows the tea order of every single one of his coworkers and brings little mugs of warm friendship like clockwork. Customizes the mug to the person, too; Sasha’s fairly sure none of them are standard fare for the Institute cupboards, so he must have brought them from home or bought them special. Sasha’s is purple, with heart-shaped handles and silhouette-illustrations of cats on it.

She’s gotten lunch with Martin a few times, but he’s not the sort of friend she’d call after work hours just to chat with, or invite to her apartment. Not yet, at least. It’s nothing against him, they just haven’t connected all that much.

Jon’s a whole other matter. At first swipe, he’s less friendly than Martin — less  _ open _ , at the very least. He’d played up the skeptic act so cartoonishly in his first few weeks in the Archives that she’d thought he was  _ joking _ . That’d been thrown to the wayside as soon as he’d noticed he had nothing to prove, not really, by being stubbornly obtuse to the evidence, and he throws himself into research with such gusto she can’t imagine him  _ really _ doubting what they’re talking about. Not as much as he’d claimed, at least. He’s got a sharp sense of humor and she might even call him a friend, but still a distant enough one for professionality.

She’d like to think it would be obvious if he was replaced, as nobody does  _ prickly and pretentious but still strangely lovable _ quite like Jonathan Sims, but.

That’s the issue.

She wouldn’t notice. She  _ hadn’t noticed _ , with Tim.

Sasha James had met Timothy Stoker her third year of university. Blind date, set up by their respective roommates — apparently the only criteria for the match had been  _ bisexual _ and  _ secretly a total nerd _ , but they’d got on like a house on fire. Been an absolutely insufferable pair, according to everyone who’d known them.

Just after realizing Tim had been replaced, Sasha had tried digging through her ancient Facebook page, untouched since uni, for old photos of the two of them. There’d been so many. The face in them had still been tagged with Tim’s name, but it’d been  _ wrong. _

She doesn’t want to look again and see if they’ve changed back, now that he’s returned, or if there’s still that horrible mask pasted atop the nostalgia-soaked candids.

Sasha’d loved Tim. Not quite romantically, though they’d tried it a few times and it’d fizzled back into friendship each time, but she’d loved him nonetheless. For all he’d joked about their attempts at a relationship, they’d always worked best as friends, and his had been an easy camaraderie, the trust that comes with knowing you can tell a person anything and they won’t leave your side.

She doesn’t know how to talk to him anymore. It stings every time she tries and fails — she’ll tell jokes that used to be theirs (that she  _ thinks _ , at least, were theirs) and he stares cold-eyed ahead at his screen. It’s not the impersonally professional way of the not-Tim, but a dull look that tells her he just doesn’t know how to laugh anymore.

It reminds her of the first time she’d seen him after Danny died. She couldn’t do anything to fix that, either, but at least she could be steady, hold him as he cracked into pieces and help him reattach every part that’d fallen to the wayside. She could trust her own eyes to tell her the truth. Sasha’s fairly sure, now, that all she can trust is herself.

If she could lose Tim, she could lose anybody.

The thought twists around her lungs and pulls the air from the room; suddenly, she cannot breathe, she can hardly  _ think _ . Tim is back, Tim is back, she reminds herself over and over: but what if it is another trick? What if she’s simply pulled back a layer of the facade, only to reveal another beneath?

Could the Stranger do that? If it could turn her memories into falsehoods, make the person closest to her in the entire world unrecognizable, what else could it do? There’s no reason to think a matryoshka of deceit is beyond its capability.

She can’t breathe. The room is all static.

At the edge of her awareness: Tim outside her door, knocking in that newly sullen way of his, fist brimming with unused emotion. Only a matter of time before all of it bursts out of him. She doesn’t hear the knock as much as she  _ sees _ it, but doesn’t reply, busy trying to lasso her mind and lungs and heartbeat into order.

“Sash?”

He  _ has to be  _ Tim — the way he says her name, the concerned waver of his voice, it’s _ so familiar. _

“I’m fine,” she says, protesting before he even asks the question. He raises an eyebrow at her in the universal gesture of  _ we’ve been friends for years, I know what it looks like when you’re having a panic attack, but if you don’t want to talk about it, we won’t talk about it. _

“Okay,” Tim says. She thinks he’d’ve made a joke, before, try and make her feel better that way, but his humor’s run out quick since he’s returned. “It alright if I sit in here for a bit?”

Sasha nods. Tim nudges her water bottle from its spot on her desk, pushes it closer to her, and she’s wordlessly grateful for the reminder. After several gulps she feels a bit more like a person.

(That isn’t something the not-Tim would’ve done, and she feels more solid than ever in her conviction that this  _ is _ Tim. Tim who knows her. Tim who’s walked her through panic more times than she can count, knows how to calm her down, knows how to make things seem okay even when they’re really, truly,  _ so very much not. _ )

“Are  _ you _ alright?” In the larger scope of things, almost certainly not, but she is eagleeyed in noticing flinches and wayward glances, and she takes close note of his gaze hummingbird-flitting to the doorway and back again every few moments. It’s a sort of wary anxiety that doesn’t fit on Tim’s features.

“I’m not the one who was hyperventilating a few minutes ago,” Tim says.

“Yeah, and I’m fine now. Work stress. You know how it is.” The lie slips off her tongue and it’s  _ sour _ , so much that she nearly gags on it. Her heartbeat hasn’t slowed yet. “Anyway, not an answer to my question.”

“‘Course I am,” he says, and there’s that patented Stoker grin, except it’s  _ not _ , it’s strained at the edges, not that buttersmooth smile it once would have been. 

They haven’t really talked about it. The elephant in the room. The corpse in the tunnels. It’s too much to narrow into words — she squeezes his hand every time they pass each other and calls him by name until it sticks in her head that  _ this is Tim _ , but they haven’t discussed it. She knows that isn’t like them.

Sasha’s not asking. She’s letting him set the pace, the boundaries, much as she wants to pry every secret out from behind the floorboards of his mind. It’s an instinct she’s getting good at ignoring, but it itches at the back of her skull.

“Did something happen?” Narrow it down. Just today, just that flicker of his eyes.

“Nothing big, not really, but —” Tim lets loose a sigh heavy enough to crush Atlas, and the words begin to flow forth all at once, breaking through the dam. “God, Sash, they keep tripping over my name, and that isn’t such a huge thing, but Martin looked at me for a solid  _ minute _ earlier like he just  _ couldn’t place who I was _ . Gave me that smile you give a vague friend-of-a-friend at a goddamn housewarming. And it’s nothing huge — god knows this shouldn’t be upsetting me, not after  _ everything else that could be upsetting me _ , but y’know the mugs he has for each of us? How mine looked like a golden retriever, and when I asked him about it, he said it just  _ reminded him of me _ ?”

(It’s around here that Sasha realizes she’s slipped: any question can turn into compulsion if she doesn’t keep her hands wrapped tight around her syllables, and she’s asked him with a capital-A, asked with a tapestatic tongue and a power that feels like a betrayal.)

“It isn’t even that  _ that thing _ had a different mug. It’s just one of the standard, plain Institute ones that’re stocked in the cabinet, now. No milk, no sugar, either. And it isn’t that I expect Martin to bring me tea, that’d be — I can get it myself, you know, but I know  _ he _ enjoys it. Likes making us all happy, just a little bit. But even  _ that’s _ gone, now.”

Tim leans his head on his hands, half-slumped on the other side of Sasha’s desk. “It’s the little things, you know? It seems like you’re the only person who actually sees  _ me _ when you look at me.”

She doesn’t say that she’s not sure that’s true, that some days all she can see when she thinks  _ Tim _ is that thing that’d replaced him. It wouldn’t help. If she can be an anchor for him, then she will — it’s the least she can do in so, so many ways.

Reassurances get stuck in her throat. How is she to comfort him when she’s dragged the words out of his mouth? She sits, and she looks, and she drinks in all the truths he’s fed her. She must do so for far too long; his vision resharpens, the words no longer flowing and the reality of the matter sinking in.

He would’ve said things were fine, were it up to him. Try to pretend everything’s still goddamn normal for just a little while longer. Tim’s good at bottling things up — less in the way of a can of soda and more in the way of a molotov cocktail. One wrong move and it’ll explode.

“Sasha,” he says. Slowly. Warily, and he’s never looked at her with that kind of suspicion before. “What the hell was that?”

“It’s hard to explain,” she says.

It  _ is _ difficult to put into words, but it’s also that she’s never  _ had to _ : Martin and Jon saw her change gradually, hole up in her office recording statement after statement until the tapestatic hiss of recorders continued even in her absence, an echo of an action so oft repeated that it sticks in the air, clings to every corner of the Archives. A ghost: repetition hanging in the atmosphere. They’d watched her stumble over question-marks, and when she drags answers out of them, they are no longer surprised. The Eye’s gifts have melded seamlessly with their existing lists of facts about her.  _ Classic Sasha, with her mismatched hair barrettes and her chunky sweaters and her spooky Archivist powers. _

Tim hasn’t seen that, she realizes all at once. This is the first time she’s slipped in her control since he’s returned.

What must it be like, to go from one moment to the next and see your best friend go from smart-witty-soft to sharp-eyed, needle-tongued, more alike in composition to the monsters that had stolen you away than to yourself?

She’d spent so much time worrying about how much Tim had changed, she’d forgotten to think of her own transformations.

“Try,” Tim says, something distant and cold in the harsh-edged syllable.

How could she deny him that?

“It wasn’t easy, getting you back. That’s not me saying I regret it — don’t you dare take it that way, I would  _ never. _ But I wasn’t powerful enough just being  _ Sasha James, head archivist, etcetera. _ It was never going to be enough — I mean, to  _ see _ past the Stranger’s masks, to bring you  _ back _ from there, it should have been impossible, I think. I’ve read through every statement I could dig up about people being replaced, and in none of them was anybody able to save the victim.”

Tim’s brow furrows. “That’s not what I was asking.”

“Hush, I’m getting to it.” She doesn’t mean to snap, winces a bit as an apology. “I think I was already on the road to becoming something, before you went missing. The more statements I read, the more time I spent in this place — it used to freak me out, being here after-hours when everyone was gone, but now being home feels  _ wrong _ . Anyways. I was going to turn into this regardless, but I… sped it along, a bit.”

“Sasha,” and he says it like he’s trying to convince himself of it, the same way she says his name. A plea for it to be true. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The Archives. The Archivist. It’s — I mean, obviously, it’s weird. More than that, though, it’s  _ powerful _ . And now, so am I.”

She is not going to beg him not to look at her differently. That isn’t like her; she hides her doubts with an easy confidence to match his own, though both are frayed by events beyond their control. What she lacks in ease she makes up for with power, and she has that in spades now: she reaches her sight out and brushes the side of his, feels the roiling confusion and betrayal and that hint of fear, the sense that they’ve each changed too irrevocably.

“I’m still me,” she says. Like she’s responding to his expression and not his thoughts. She doesn’t draw back quick enough not to feel the sharp sting of knowledge: he knows she’d tangled herself in the edges of his mind, he knows the extent of her ability.

“Don’t do that,” Tim snaps. That new anger rises to the surface. She doesn’t have to read his mind to see it; it boils off him in waves, almost contagious.

Too far, a part of her whispers. Self control has never been a strong suit of Sasha’s, curious to the point of detriment, of danger to herself and danger to her friends. It’s never been quite so literal, but she supposes that’s the world they live in, now — it shouldn’t surprise her.

Guilt is a stone in her stomach, weighing her down. Getting heavier.

“I’m sorry. It — it happens, sometimes. When I ask things. I try not to — it helps, when I’m taking direct statements, but other times it just… slips out.”

He nods. She tries to see past the hurt in his eyes, unmasked by the careful line of his mouth, but he’s closed himself off and she’s promised not to pry, if only to herself. It’s a betrayal of trust. She  _ knows _ that.

“Thank you. For bringing me back.” Stilted sentences; the compulsion has faded, and nothing rolls off the tongue quite the same way without the Eye urging it along. “I should get back to work, now. Still need to do the follow-up on the Barnabas statement.”

He stands to go, and she’s struck with the width of the divide between them — the length of a desk, less than a meter, but so impassable it may as well be a canyon. Rickety rope bridge crossing the space: if it falls apart as they try to reach each other, they will surely be lost to the depths, but  _ God _ , she wants to  _ try. _ It’s wrong, this distance.

She reaches out, takes his hand before he can turn around. Loose-gripped. He can let go if he wants to, if he’d prefer that, but she  _ really _ hopes he doesn’t.

“I’m still me, Tim. You’re still you.”  _ Tim-and-Sasha _ — once upon a time, so inseparable that one name was hardly ever spoken without the other tacked on. They’ve grown apart and come back together over the years, but never has something so concrete threatened them.

He squeezes her hand tight in lieu of a response. There’s a smile on his face when he looks over his shoulder at her, but it feels plastered-on, like she could peel at the edges of it and reveal something else underneath.

She doesn’t push. Just lets his hand fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this one took a bit! next chapter'll be up sooner.
> 
> donate to bail funds if you're able to; [here's a good place to start](https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd).
> 
> **up next:** the calm before.


	5. everyone is ready for their call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things are too sacred to interrupt, even at the cost of not knowing what’s going on beyond that door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warnings:** bit of beholding-typical invasion of privacy; elias being a creep. shockingly, these are regarding separate events. also, a brief panic attack.
> 
>  **recommended listening:** [worth it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnJURSfVoMg) by haley heynderickx.
> 
>  **bonus:** [everyone go look at this amazing fanart sy did of sasha & tim the last scene!! their expressions absolutely kill me!!!!!!](https://akosyy.tumblr.com/post/620203113030221824/tim-and-sashaonce-upon-a-time-so-inseparable)

Sasha doesn’t go to the Institute’s breakroom these days.

Sasha doesn’t really take  _ breaks _ these days — she’s single-minded in her focus, intent on finding as many answers as she can to the questions swirling around her day-in and day-out. The breakroom is up two flights of stairs and constantly cramped, and she doesn’t like crowds, much, not anymore. Too many people, too much temptation to take a lockpick to their deepest secrets.  _ Knock knock, open the door. _ Whatever she finds inside, it will be satisfying — but that is a beast in and of itself, the temptation of that satisfaction, the pierce of  _ want _ in her stomach.

It isn’t quite that she feels guilty for the urge itself. That would be simpler, but not  _ accurate _ , and she wants to know herself as much as she wants to know everyone around her. The urge to describe things clinically and specific does not end when it reaches inside her own heart. It’s more that she thinks she  _ should _ feel guilty.

It’d been a betrayal to pry Tim’s feelings out of him, but only because that was Tim. The subject, not the action, had been the wounding force.

The fact of the matter is that the more knowledge she gains, the more she’ll be able to protect her friends. She’s never claimed it wasn’t a selfish goal, but it is the  _ point _ of all of this horror. They cannot leave the Institute, so she will become part of its structure and keep them safe, be the very walls around them. It doesn’t work if she’s the one hurting them, and so she won’t.

It’s as easy as that.

The other Institute staff tend to avoid her, nowadays. There was a time they were friendly with her; she stopped into artefact storage to check in on the few old colleagues stubbornly remaining every so often, but even they give her odd looks now. Sasha does not want to unpack the meaning of those stares. The skepticism there, the  _ pity. _ Oh, poor Archivist, got promoted and now all she does is sit in her office and work-work-work on things that couldn’t possibly be real. She knows the Institute-at-large’s feelings on the work they do; it’s valuable from a folkloric and cultural standpoint but useless in any practical way, meaningful only to analyze the society from which the stories come. And of course, that’s a value in itself. But none of it is  _ real _ . Skeptics, eighty-five percent of them, and they think she’s lost her edge down in the dark corners of the Institute’s basement.

It’s easier not to correct them. Safer, for them, maybe. She’s under no illusion that it’ll protect them in any meaningful way — ignorance, after all, hadn’t saved Tim’s brother, nor the casualties of the practical research division — but they might be luckier than the Archives staff. May have a chance of escaping.

So it’s rare she goes anywhere she’s likely to run into the rest of the staff. To the library, quickly, only to check out books and flee back to her office to pore over them. To artefact storage to examine if a particular mirror is the same from a decade-old statement, then back downstairs. Not to safety, but to familiarity.

She’s not quite sure when the Archives started to feel  _ normal _ , like she fit in there more than anywhere else. Her home not quite her home, her hands not quite her own, her thoughts tainted by some outside omnipotence. Everything she is entwined with the building.

The further she goes from the heart of the Archives, the more she feels wrong, inside-out, turned-around, trapped in a maze with a spool of red yarn leading her back down into the depths. Ariadne’s string only returns her to the heart of the labyrinthe. (She’s unsure who the Minotaur is in this analogy: the monsters of the statements, or she herself, Archivist trapped in a maze by design? And  _ who’s _ design, at that?)

The twisting of her stomach and clench of her jaw is one thing, but she does her best to ignore the sensation for the sake of caffeine.

Martin’s out doing field follow-up — trying to break into the apartment detailed in the latest horrific meat-themed statement. (Sasha thinks he’d gone vegetarian after the last one. He didn’t tell her so, but she’d gotten a snippet of thought when she’d handed him the newest stack of bloodsoaked words. She’s not sure if that’ll make the experience better or worse, but the assistants had drawn straws for who’d be stuck with this one, and poor Martin had lost.) She is, of course, grateful work is being done, but it means the absence of Martin’s signature doting. No handmade tea delivered to her office.

She makes a mental note to herself to make sure Martin knows just how much she appreciates him when he returns.

In the meantime, she makes her way through the halls with the same single-minded focus she applies to everything nowadays. There is a distinct lack of people standing in her way on the path from her office to the breakroom. She thinks of hazily-remembered Animal Planet documentaries; fields’ worth of deer scattering at the sound of a far-off wolf, but no, she doesn’t have that sort of presence. It must be something else.

The moment she thinks it, the Knowledge inserts itself into her mind: it’s currently 12:13 pm. Lunchtime. Most of the Institute staff is on break; those who remain are locked away in their own corners of the building, breathing in their own dust and making their own revelations about the nature of their humanity.

It’s directly after she comes to that realization that she reaches the breakroom and finds that its closed door does little to mask the voices coming from within. 

Jon’s reaches her first. “I know that we’ve — that I’ve been, well,  _ awkward _ feels like an understatement, doesn’t it?”

Tim, harder to make out, with a bitterness that’s become characteristic in the weeks since his return: “ _ Yeah _ , I’d say so.”

“I know, I know. But I want to apologize. And… I want to say…”

“Spit it out, Jon.”

“I missed you.”

“Bullshit.”

(Sasha shouldn’t be listening to this.)

“I didn’t  _ know _ that I did, but. He —  _ it _ — was different.  _ Less _ , in every way, and you’re — well, you’re  _ you _ , you know? I mean. At first, I thought I’d done something wrong, to make it so distant — so, uh, so cold. Because you’re not like that.”

(Jon’s right, Sasha thinks. Tim’s so warm it hurts sometimes; like looking into the sun, that brightness, that confidence, that all-encompassing good-naturedness. Even now, when it’s more blistering than comforting. Cold is not a word she could ever use to describe Tim Stoker.)

“Thank you?”

There’s a pause. Sasha realizes all at once how she would look to anyone walking past: a child spying on a conversation not meant for her ears, half of her face pressed to the door, the better to hear them with.  _ God _ , it’s stupid. She shouldn’t be listening, shouldn’t be straining for the next bit of wayward dialogue to filter through the wood.

But knowledge is power, isn’t it? Knowledge is the only way for her to achieve anything. It isn’t as if she’s prying into their minds to retrieve it — just overhearing something.

It’s good to know Jon is talking to Tim. Makes her feel better about how she’d left their last conversation, that brewing rage she keeps seeing spike in him — maybe she isn’t the one who’ll get through to him, but at least she isn’t the only one  _ trying _ . She knows he was close with Jon, back when they were both in research. Maybe…

Before her thoughts can go any further, she hears, quiet, muffled not by the door but as if Jon’s face is pressed against fabric. (The fabric of Tim’s sweatshirt, maybe? Is that rustling of fabric Jon’s arms wrapping around him?) “I’m glad you’re back, Tim.”

She should leave, she thinks again, and she does. Caffeine be damned. Some things are too sacred to interrupt, even at the cost of not knowing what’s going on beyond that door.

—————

Things are getting better.

Sasha can say that with some certainty, though she can no longer differentiate between the things she knows and the things she Knows: does this knowledge come to her through the omnipresence itching at the side of her mind, or simple observation? Is she seeing Jon and Tim grow closer, the way her trio of assistants leave together at the end of workdays a few times a week, Martin added to their breakroom whispering seamlessly? Or is this skimmed from the edges of their thoughts?

Regardless, she thinks, it’s a good thing.

“Tim,” she says, hand waving, speeding up in her steps as she tries to catch him on his way into the Institute. She’s long since exchanged her old classic heeled-Oxfords look for something more practical, the old Docs well-scuffed from her university days but far easier to run in; Sasha makes short work of the Institute’s front steps, grabs onto Tim’s arm. Loose grip, easy to slip away if he chooses.

They were always the physical sort — hardly ever one without the other and always touching, Sasha pressed into Tim’s side or Tim’s head resting on her shoulder, hands holding as they walked down the street, playful shoves. It’s been different since he returned, but. Maybe if she works up to it. Just a little bit, here and there.

She misses her best friend, even with him right here.

That isn’t the point.

He’s looking at her with a question on his tongue and she’s all too aware she didn’t have anything planned: her hand on his arm, and then… she hadn’t gotten that far, too swept up in seeing him go through the door. Improvise, Sasha. She can say proudly that she only fumbles for a moment before fixing a smile on her face.

“I was wondering if you wanted to do a movie night, soon? Martin and Jon too, if they want.”

It shouldn’t be this difficult. She does not reach out to brush against his thoughts and grasp onto how he’s feeling; she does not ask with bold letters and echoing power. She’s made a decision: she may have made the choice to be a monster, but that doesn’t mean she needs to be a bad friend.

This moment feels eternal, frozen in amber, shadowbox picture show paused halfway through with no satisfying conclusion to be found — but Tim unfreezes. Smiles a too-hesitant smile and says “Yeah, I’d like that. I’ll ask them.”

Just like that they’re in motion again.

Sasha can walk into the building at Tim’s side, and it’s not the same as before, but neither is the distance pulled taut enough to snap. It simply  _ is _ .

“I’m free any night but tonight,” Sasha says, once they get to the basement and parting ways becomes a necessity.

“Why? Hot date? Finally redownload Tinder? Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Yes, actually. Not — not the Tinder thing, God. Never again. But… date, yeah.”

—————

Tim runs out of steam for conversation quickly these days. Not like before, when he could ramble on and on and make her laugh endlessly until they lapsed into comfortable silence; nowadays, he runs out of statements and she’s got nothing left but the questions that remain sickly-sticky behind her tongue.

She hates it most times, but today she is grateful for it. There’s only so many of his questions she can even answer.

Sasha tells Tim she has a date, and it isn’t a  _ lie _ , but she isn’t sure it’s true, either. It isn’t as if she or Melanie have said the word. They’ve been out a few times, but  _ after-work drinks _ are such a nebulous concept — not like  _ weekend coffee _ or  _ dinner and a movie _ , not coded specifically one way or the other.

Ambiguity has never been her strong suit. Sasha likes putting labels on things, likes keeping herself orderly within her own mind. This is where she puts the things she knows, this is where she puts the things she will find answers to, parcelled out accordingly by how much of a puzzle they pose. There is no category for mysteries which remain answerless; Sasha has neither room nor patience enough to suffer a lack of resolutions. 

She doesn’t know where to put the question of Melanie King.

It’s been quite a while since Sasha has had a crush, and the concept looms in front of her like a stonewrought castle in the snow, hiding something beastly within its unlocked doors. If only she could push open the gates, perhaps she could find the answers she so sorely wishes for — but it’s a different kind of bravery than the kind that allows her to charge into danger without a second thought, a different sort than holding scissors up to her hair and not caring where the pieces fall. It’s a delicate situation, and Sasha’s better at things she can take a hammer to.

She keeps thinking about that flower in Melanie’s hair, the first time she saw her. How fragile it had looked. The contrast there: Melanie so clearly strong, so clearly brave and full of fire just beneath the surface, but something so delicate. God, Sasha yearns to unravel that dichotomy.

The day passes in a crawl. She checks the clocks’ mechanisms several times to ensure they have not stopped; they seem to be moving so goddamn  _ slowly _ .

And finally it’s five. Finally she is able to leave, pulling herself from behind her desk on-the-dot for once; no point lingering. Jon’s still in the assistants’ office as she passes. She aims a smile at him, but he doesn’t seem to notice, wrapped up as he gets in whatever research he’s doing today.

She hopes it isn’t getting to him. The statements take their toll; she knows that better than anyone.

Freedom is so close she can taste it. The sun outside, still high in the just-autumnal sky, is warm as it comes through the windows in the front hall, and she is so ready to feel it on her skin, uninterrupted by cobwebs or ever-present watching eyes. The Institute may as well be a part of her by now, adjusted as she is to her new position, her new  _ identity _ , but there are plenty of aspects of herself she isn’t fond of. It’s all facades, after all — she’s willing to take off the mask of The Archivist for a while, allow herself a shred of normalcy.

She’s earned that, hasn’t she? A maybe-date with a pretty girl. After everything she has been through, she’s earned that.

The dream is shattered all at once by Elias’ voice cutting through the entryway. It is piercingly loud against the silence, cuts through her thoughts.

“Archivist!”

Sasha is careful, careful, careful to keep her expression neutral, plaster the most business-polite smile on that she is capable of. Gertrude’s voice rings in her ears, tapestatic tinged:  _ trust nothing he says. Play ignorant as long as you can. _

It is easier said than done. “Mr. Bouchard,” she says, nothing if not cordial, even as her thoughts stew within her. Sasha has long-since mastered the art of not saying the things she so deeply wishes to say. Perhaps in another world, she would ask Jonah what he is planning for her: pour all her power into her words and hope it could make even a dent in the filter of one who has lived so long. In this one, she stays quiet.

“I just wanted to congratulate you,” he says. Has that grin that makes her want to flee instantly, stretched too untrue at the corners. Elias always looks like he knows something she doesn’t and like he wants to hold the promise of that knowledge over her head. It makes her skin crawl. “On your remarkably fast acclimation to your new position, that is.”

She’s had the job for over a year now. But today she began a statement with simply  _ recording by The Archivist _ for the first time, and the words ricochet across the edges of her memory. She knows what he means.

She  _ hates _ it.

“Thank you,” Sasha says. Flatvoiced, letting nothing past the cracks in her surface. They are growing by the moment, spreading across the carefully-crafted mask that she’s placed so haphazardly.

“And, of course, on bringing Mr. Stoker back. Quite an accomplishment, to return someone from the Stranger’s realm, and without any help at all?” 

He pauses just a moment too long, and she has to fight tooth and nail to keep panic from flashing behind her eyes. He can’t know about Leitner’s assistance. The tunnels are out of his view, she  _ knows that _ , the tapes had told her as much. For all he knows, she’d found the book on her own. Brought Tim back all by her lonesome — and hadn’t she sacrificed enough of herself, turned herself over entirely to the Eye to do so? Does it  _ matter _ that she’d had help with the  _ how _ of it, when she’d done the work herself?

When Elias picks up, as if he’d never trailed off, it’s with a degree of scarcely-hidden contempt in his voice, so ill-concealed she thinks it could only ever be purposeful. “Gertrude would be proud.”

Everything is moving far too quickly around her, her lungs suddenly so empty.  _ Keep your cool, Sasha. _ Nothing good will come of letting Elias know anything about her. She says “Thank you,” again, words failing her but only coming out half-shaky, only trembling at the edges. That’s fine.

“I won’t keep you, of course. Tell Miss King I said hello.”

He waves, turns on his heel and strolls, leisurely, back to his office. He is utterly unconcerned with her reaction to his words — or perhaps he’ll see them regardless of whether he is looking at her. The walls have eyes here.

Sasha can’t get out of the Institute quickly enough. She makes it two blocks down the street before her breathing comes too shallow and she has to sit on a bench, head in hands.

“He doesn’t know anything,” she tells herself, eyes screwed shut as if that could keep the Watcher at bay. “He  _ can’t _ know anything.”

Gertrude’s tapes had gone back under the hidden-compartment drawer the moment Sasha had listened enough times to have them half-memorized, taken notes on everything that seemed important, and Leitner’s book has joined them there. She has said nothing to Tim, nothing to Martin or to Jon, of what she’d learned there. She’s considered it, but… It would be too dangerous for them, she’s decided. The point of this all is to keep them  _ safe _ .

Her consumption of statements is at a near-ravenous pace, but that cannot possibly be enough to aim Bouchard’s eyes at her with any suspicion. It’s what he  _ wants _ , she thinks — an unnerving side effect of something that’s become natural as breathing. It itches at her, that she’s likely playing into whatever plans he has, whatever ritual the Archivist is meant to be. Whatever grand designs he has are utterly unknown to her, and any blind spot is a weakness.

Devoting any time to researching  _ him _ within his own temple is foolish, so she’ll have to take that work home with her. She  _ will _ take that work home with her — she’s gone too long without investigating that particular mystery, nearly forgot it was even a  _ threat _ with the all-consuming emotional typhoon of bringing Tim back. Everything else has fallen to the wayside for the sake of that particular endeavor.

Now that it’s done, now that he’s safe and recovering and the Stranger’s body is rotting away in the tunnels, she needs to turn her eye to bigger hazards. To Elias, Jonah, the Institute.

That’s one decision made.

It doesn’t quite quell her panic; she’s got enough of that to spare nowadays. A plan has always helped her, though, and a few more moments with her hair twisted up in her fingers and the hum of the city around her should be enough —

“Sasha?”

It’s the second time in an hour that a called name has dragged her sharply from her thoughts, but where Elias’ was condescending and callous, this new voice carries all the warmth and concern of a spring day. When Sasha looks up, it’s to meet dark eyes framed with ocean-blue hair.

Sasha’s smile may be shaky at the edges, but it is no less genuine for the trembling.

“Hey, Melanie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **up next:** a maybe-date with a pretty girl.


	6. plant your heart in community gardens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha tells Melanie everything, and with the telling comes such a sense of freedom that she wonders why she ever tried to conceal it in the first place. The strangeness of her job, of her life — it isn’t as if she’d be able to keep it secret for long, anyways. It follows her in every stray syllable, every misplaced question mark, every silversorry shine of the eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay on this one! enjoy!
> 
>  **content warnings:** mentions of alcohol.
> 
>  **recommended listening:** [community gardens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XZWJ9_vrHo) by the scary jokes.

It’s odd, this double-edged-sword that is  _ after-work drinks _ , the conundrum of undefined moments. Melanie’s presence is enough to distract Sasha fairly efficiently from Elias’ cryptic bullshit, but brings with it a whole host of other mysteries in need of solving: ducks in a row trailing along at Melanie’s heels, except each duck carries at least a dozen anxieties, and perhaps ducks aren’t the best metaphor, maybe they’re something more dangerous, something with teeth sharp enough to kill —

There she goes again. Thoughts winding mazes around the center of her — she’s chasing something through that labyrinth, even now, but none of the metaphors line up.

God, she needs another drink.

“Sash? You there?” Oh, that’s Melanie, hand waving in front of Sasha’s face. By the furrow of her brow, it looks like she’s been doing it for at least a few seconds as Sasha stares into space. Sasha winces.

“Yeah, sorry. Long day at work, you know how it is.”

Melanie snorts. “Not really, no. I mean, I maintain that Ghost Hunt’s as research-based as any — you can tell that to Jon, too, see if he turns as red as last time I visited your  _ esteemed prestigious organization _ — but… I’ve never actually worked in academia, and sure as fuck nowhere like the Magnus Institute.”

“Not so different from other jobs, once you get past the spooky stuff. Just picture, like, a  _ really _ haunted library.”

She doesn’t know why she’s lying.

The Magnus Institute’s as far from a normal job as she could possibly imagine, and Sasha could not be blind to that if she tried — if she walked around with a ribbon tied tight over her eyes and bumped into every watching wall day after day, it would still be unfathomable to ignore the Institute’s quirks. Before long, she’d knock into a bookshelf, send a particularly cursed book tumbling down and unleash whatever brand of horrors lies within.

Sasha used to consider herself a skeptic. Her mother raised her with stories about ghosts, but she’d never seen any herself that could not be brushed off as tricks of the light or sleep deprivation during particularly grueling exam seasons. There’s a part of her that, against all logic, liked the fairytale notion of people leaving such a magnificent mark on the world that something remains after death, but the lack of proof that she could hold in her hands and examine with her eyes was always damning.

Once upon a time, she would have denied such a belief, argued both sides: yes, there are accounts of apparitions for years upon years upon years, but that could easily be explained by humanity’s stubborn urge to believe that we  _ mean something _ . It’s understandable. It doesn’t have to be real.

Sasha and Tim had debated it, once. Early on in knowing each other; shortly after Sasha found out Tim’d been in his high school’s debate league —  _ high ranking _ , at that — and shortly before their arguing over things that held no value whatsoever became enough of a game that they’d crack into breathless laughter after less than a minute of fierce deliberation.

Sasha had taken the position of belief, in that particular discussion. It isn’t that she was  _ lying _ , just that her convictions, where the supernatural was concerned, were a bit more malleable in those days. It would have been just as easy for her to rebut her own statements, make it a one-woman show.

By the time she’d met Tim for a second time, after two months as a practical researcher, her stance had gotten quite a bit firmer. It takes a hardened skeptic determined in their disbelieve to walk out of that particular division without any strong feelings about the paranormal.

“Haunted library’s got you down, then?” Melanie wears a smile like a shield, and Sasha does not know if she should be trying to chip through those defenses and find out what lies underneath the meticulously-crafted armor or if she should place a kiss against cold metal and hope it is warm enough to be felt beneath. Mystery of all mysteries. Sasha with that constant urge to  _ solve _ .

“Haunted  _ boss _ — well, I don’t know if  _ he’s _ haunted, but he’s creepy as anything.”

“Like,  _ boss creepy _ , or like, you work in a place that may as well have a sign in front saying  _ bring your cursed shit here _ creepy?”

Sasha thinks for a moment, lands on a very firm declaration of “Both. He said some cryptic shit about Tim today.”

Melanie squints. 

Sasha picks up tells almost obsessively, connecting the dots between expressions and what follow — she makes up for having no natural skill at reading  _ people-in-general _ with a dedication to learning each and every quirk of those she cares about. Martin’s remarked on how creepy it is that she and Tim can practically read one another’s minds via microexpressions alone.

She doesn’t know all of Melanie’s looks yet, but she knows this one to be the way Melanie regards her when trying to figure out if she should ask a question or not. (She gets the sense that, were Sasha anyone else, Melanie would be likely to blurt out her queries with no regard to whether or not it would be rude. It’s charming that she holds the urge back, but God knows Sasha, of all people, has no room to judge anyone for questions.) Sasha nods, a  _ go ahead _ without words.

“First time I came in, with my statement, last year. Passed a guy in the hallway on my way down there and he brushed past me, really  _ rudely _ , and Jon said  _ oh, don’t mind Tim, he does that. _ That’s not the same Tim you’re always talking about, though. Is it?”

It seems the universe is giving Sasha chance after chance to tell the truth about the Institute; what it did to her, to Tim.

Sasha deserves something normal, but Melanie deserves the truth from her. That must be more important; tearing away any facades, letting herself be someone Melanie can trust.

“It’s complicated,” she starts. Takes a sip of her drink — doesn’t even remember what it is she’s gotten, just that it’s raspberry-pink and sickeningly sweet and tipping her quickly towards tipsy — and continues. “Remember the woman you gave the statement about, with the staples?”

Melanie shudders exaggeratedly. “Try not to.”

“Something like that took Tim, for a while. Swapped him out, like — like old changeling stories. Replaced him entirely — physically, yeah, but also in everyone’s memory, in photos, all of it. But I brought him back.”

She says it matter-of-factly as if that would make it a less shocking proclamation. Everyone who knows anything about the entities has told her that it is nothing less than a goddamn miracle; unheard of, once-in-a-lifetime, even  _ Gertrude _ would not have been able to do such a thing, and she had been Archivist for decades upon decades. It was an impossibility.

She would give up her humanity a thousand times over were it necessary to do so, just to get Tim back. She prays she doesn’t have to, that the Stranger has gotten the message: her Archives are  _ not _ to be fucked with.

“You  _ brought him back? _ ” Melanie, though all-but-naive to the ways of the fears, isn’t fooled for a second by Sasha’s false modesty. Her eyes are wide, looking across their two-person bar booth at Sasha.

“I guess the Archives aren’t actually  _ that _ normal. It’d be nice if they were, I suppose, but…” A deep breath, a smile. “Nothing’s that easy, is it?”

“Do people get replaced  _ often _ ? This something I’m going to have to be worried about if I keep seeing you?”

“No.” Sasha speaks with such instant ferocity that she’s almost embarrassed; a blush creeps up on her, dark red rosepetals on her cheeks. “I don’t think you have to worry, at least — I’d like to hope between the Not-Tim and the worms we’ve had enough excitement at the Archives, but even if something else does come, I’m… I’m working on being able to stop it. I think I  _ could _ stop it.”

“How’d’you plan to do  _ that _ , Archivist James?” Melanie has a smile on her face again, teasing tone to her question; it’s like she’s interviewing Sasha for her series, and Sasha can’t help but laugh. This is what it feels like to be trusted. Melanie didn’t even  _ doubt _ Sasha’s stories; took them all in stride, and Sasha thinks she might be head-over-heels for Melanie. Just maybe.

“I’ve got my ways,” Sasha says, winks theatrically.

“Alright, miss mysterious. I’m counting on you to save me if I go all damsel-in-distress and get eaten by a ghost.”

“Please, you’d be able to save yourself.”

“Yeah, but where’s the fun there?”

“Point.”

“Now, rewind — what the hell was that about  _ worms? _ ”

—————

Sasha tells Melanie everything, and with the telling comes such a sense of freedom that she wonders why she ever tried to conceal it in the first place. The strangeness of her job, of her  _ life _ — it isn’t as if she’d be able to keep it secret for long, anyways. It follows her in every stray syllable, every misplaced question mark, every silversorry shine of the eyes.

It’s possible,  _ probable _ , even, that an ordinary life has left Sasha’s reach. It’s a sacrifice she’s made.

She’d make it again.

Now, giggling over raspberry-whatevers — something with rum, she thinks, the color her hair was before the dye faded out to a pale nothing sort of color, but Melanie’d ordered for her, has been to this bar enough times that they give her a discount — she is unburdened by concealed truths, trading stories back and forth. Melanie is sipping at a beer. She’d offered Sasha a sip and laughed when Sasha’d wrinkled her nose at it, and despite that cloying taste on her tongue, the sight of Melanie’s smile was sweet.

Curiosity and time and alcohol have not conspired to make Sasha  _ brave _ , per se, but for a moment all of the worries are gone. Everything is a mess, but Melanie knows about the disaster zone that is Sasha’s life and is still sitting across from her. More, Melanie’s shared stories in return: the falling-out with the friend she’d started Ghost Hunt UK with, the ghosts in her childhood home that her parents had never believed were there, how angry that disbelief had made her. How Melanie still carries that defiant rage and fuels herself on it.

Melanie has a wry grin on her face as she says that. Sasha can understand; spite is powerful fuel. She can’t count the amount of professors she’d had in university who’d looked down their noses at her and judged her a failed academic before even talking to her — Miss James with her pink glasses and two part-time jobs, her passing interest in the supernatural and her firm belief in fairytales as a severely unappreciated and understudied genre, of course  _ she _ would never do anything important.

(And where is she now? Archivist. Powerful. Wrapped up in things she can’t quite comprehend, yes, but she’s more than she could’ve  _ dreamed _ of back then — certainly more than she thought was possible, back in the days of half-hearted skepticism.)

“Weirdest thing you’ve seen on a ghost hunt?”

They’ve been tossing questions back and forth for a bit now. Sasha doesn’t think hers have any static hidden between the vowels; Melanie hasn’t commented, if they do, and Sasha doesn’t doubt for a moment that Melanie would say something if Sasha’d compelled her by mistake. If she minded.

Melanie takes a moment, takes another sip from her beer. “Tie between… the plastic skeleton buried in a basement to look like a dead body — I swear Andy almost had a heart attack at that one —  _ or _ the ghost without eyes.”

Sasha’s watched her fair share of Ghost Hunt videos. Her life is such that mostly-fake ghost stories are a nice way to unwind after a day digging through piles of very much real, very much horrifying stories about things that are probably trying to kill her. She remembers the former; they’d milked that skeleton for all the suspense it had in its frail plastic body, right up until the femur snapped to reveal nothing but hollow, dusty air inside.

“You didn’t put  _ that _ on your channel.”

“Oh, ol’ no-eyes was  _ way _ before the channel — back when Andy and I’d just break into haunted places for the fun of it. It’s kind of what gave us the idea to  _ make _ a video series, actually. Couldn’t get any pictures of it in the moment — they all came out glitched and blurry, though I’ve got no clue if that’s because my hand was shaking like hell or if it was, y’know,  _ spookiness _ . Andy didn’t see it. Didn’t  _ really _ believe me.”

“What was it?”

“Y’want a statement, Sash?”

The all-at-once panic of misinterpretation rises somewhere in Sasha’s throat, choking her words as they sputter out. “No, no, not a statement, just —”

Melanie, grinning: “I’m teasing.”

Sasha, blushing: “Oh.”

“Not really enough for a whole statement, anyways. We were underground somewhere? Andy had a friend — Frank, or something — who did urban exploring, and they recommended a spot. We got pretty lost, and I turned a corner, and there was, I swear to God, the most fucked-up ghost I’ve ever seen.”

“And you’ve seen a lot,” Sasha cuts in, half a question.

“And I’ve seen  _ a lot _ ,” Melanie says. Her smile’s still bright. Sasha knows exactly why people gravitate to her Youtube channel — Sasha doesn’t think she could stop looking at Melanie if she tried. “We’ve talked about doing an episode on it even without footage, but… It doesn’t hold as much weight  _ retold _ , you know? It was taller than me — I know,  _ most things are _ , I know. Bloodier’n most ghosts. But that doesn’t really get across the way it was looking at me. No eyes, but staring nonetheless.”

There’s a moment that Sasha wishes this  _ were _ a statement; wishes she could catalogue it, take messy notes in multicolored ink in the margins and tear apart each sentence to find the meaning beneath.

She knows the statements don’t help anyone but herself. It’s a selfish thing to wish for, to put her teeth into Melanie’s most terrifying memories and pull them apart, see what each bit of them tastes like. Maybe it’s easier to admit that she wants to know more about  _ this _ , about the specters that haunt Melanie and could be one of the thousands of statements in the Archives, than it is to say that, more than anything, she wants to know more about Melanie; she wants to make sense of her and be continuously surprised by everything that doesn’t fall into the expected, wants to constantly reorganize the mental list of facts to fit every shred of new information. She wants to do that forever.

“And now  _ you’re _ staring,” Melanie says, completely oblivious to what Sasha has just realized. For all that Sasha likes keeping her thoughts in neat boxes, the sheer  _ depth _ of her feelings comes as a shock.

“Sorry,” she says, a bit belated. Trying very hard to focus more on the horror story Melanie’s been telling (and  _ really _ , given Sasha’s job, it  _ would _ be the near-statement that has her finally processing her emotions, wouldn’t it?) and less on the way Melanie’d said  _ Sash _ and looked at her as if gauging her reaction, as if she cared deeply about what Sasha likes to be called. Stop thinking about the way the bar lights aren’t nearly dim enough to hide her flushed-dark cheeks and she isn’t nearly drunk enough for that to be an excuse. Focus, Sasha.

“So what’d you do?” Sasha leans forward, tries not to look too eager for any scrap of information.

“Trapped the ghost in a lamp and made it give me three wishes,” Melanie says, sarcasm like honey behind her teeth.

“Of course. And you wished for…?”

“ _ Sasha _ .” Melanie says it so seriously, for a moment Sasha cannot tell whether it’s a half-joking reprimand or the answer, and the thought of being  _ wished for _ makes her heart do a stupid little flip-flop in her chest.  _ Jesus _ , it’s like she’s a teenager with a first crush. She pays  _ taxes _ , for God’s sake, Melanie shouldn’t be getting to her like this.

But then she continues — “If I tell you, it’ll jinx it,” and there’s that teasing lilt back in her voice, and Sasha starts laughing. It’s so goddamn rare that she’s so  _ happy _ nowadays, in the moments such a thing happens it seems to burst from her all at once; she’s breathless with it, and soon enough Melanie is joining in, and Sasha thinks to herself,  _ oh, this is what harmony sounds like, our laughter spinning together. _

The night continues in kind. They trade stories back and forth, sometimes true — Sasha’s sordid past as a high school cheerleader (only lasting one year, and  _ only _ to please her mother with extracurriculars), Melanie’s childhood movie star crushes (and her shock that Sasha has never seen  _ Alien _ and has no idea who Ripley is) — and sometimes entirely outlandish and kept up only until one of them can no longer contain their giggling.

By the time the pub closes, Sasha’s just drunk enough to justify reaching out and taking Melanie’s hand as they walk to the tube together. She’s just about forgotten everything that isn’t  _ this _ — the undefined thing blooming between them, sprouting through the cracks between their entwined fingers, rosepetals in the air. 

Melanie squeezes her hand tight before letting go on the platform. Sasha grins the whole train ride home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy chapter! fluffy chapter! there's no way this could possibly go wrong, is there?
> 
> hit me up on tumblr @ [dykivist](http://dykivist.tumblr.com)!
> 
>  **up next:** the storm.


	7. we hold on (for dear life)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing so good can last for long.
> 
> In the end, she gets a week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **recommended listening:** [dog days are over](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3cgdlHzQDQ) by florence + the machine.
> 
> **content warnings in the end notes!**

It has been a very long time since Sasha has felt so good.

Her date with Melanie — and yes, she is now firm in calling it that,  _ a date _ , label pressed firmly in the warm space between Melanie’s hand and her own — that seems to have simplified the world. No monsters loom. For the moment, at least, things are peaceful; Tim is smiling more, and even if most are glimpsed in passing and aimed at the other archival assistants rather than herself, she’s happy that Tim’s happy.

She reads statements and she files them into color-coded folders when she is finished and it is easy, simple work. Gertrude may have kept the Archives in disarray for good reason, but Sasha has weighed the mess versus the threat Jonah poses and found she would rather have neatness, even if it does come with some risk. (Anything important, she hides in the hidden desk compartment.) She looks at the man next to her on the train and she Knows he has a story to tell, but she lets him be. Paper is satisfying enough, for now. The taste of static and ink lingers on her tongue even as she eats her regular, human meals; she cooks herself dinner and the statements’ words echo.

It’s nothing she isn’t used to, by now. If there will come a time she subsists solely on stolen answers to staticked questions, it has not yet arrived.

Work is strange, but routine. She goes to the Archives and leaves at a decent time; her days of staying until she’s nearly missed the last train home seem to be gone, and for that she cannot help but be grateful. It isn’t as if she was being paid for the overtime.

Sasha floats in the space between one date and the next; Melanie had texted Sasha the morning after their last outing,  _ free next saturday? _ , and of  _ course _ Sasha was, of course she’d clear away the towering stacks of statements around her to make space for Melanie any day. 

There’s something about having a concrete event to look forward to that makes everything implausibly weightless. Nothing can hurt her until after next Saturday. If any monsters manifest themselves in the Archives, they can take a damn number and wait in line.

None appear, but nothing so good can last for long.

In the end, she gets a week.

On the eighth day, Sasha wakes late. Her alarm rings its muffled jingle buried somewhere beneath her pillow, and it takes her an embarrassingly long time to fumble it out of its cotton-and-silk coffin. Sasha has never been a morning person. Among everything that the Archives have changed about her, her disdain for rising with the sun has, apparently, remained consistent.

She blinks at the too-bright numbers on her phone until they shift from a blurred mess to lines that mean something, and then nearly drops the thing in her haste to untangle herself from her bedsheets.  _ Fuck _ , she’s late. She’s  _ two hours  _ late, and she isn’t sure she  _ can _ be fired but that’s no reason to take the risk.

She sure as hell doesn’t want to talk to Elias about  _ her tardiness _ , see that condescending look that slots so perfectly into place on his face. Has he worn the same expression in every body he’s taken? If so, she thinks, it’s a miracle no one’s figured him out. It is a uniquely unpleasant expression.

Would he still look at her that way if he knew how many of his secrets she was aware of? Would he still smile with all those teeth?

She won’t find out, she’s sure. Not for a long time at the very least; Gertrude had advised subtlety, secrecy, caution when dealing with Jonah, and Sasha is inclined to take her word for it. She has come to realize that there are many things about Gertrude Robinson that she doesn’t understand; Gertrude’s disdain for those she spent her time with, her willingness to throw  _ people _ at problems and see what sticks, regardless of the cost. (Gertrude, after all, had never been the one to pay any prices.) Is a lack of loved ones a symptom of the job? A lack of care?

After too long as Archivist, are feelings something left behind, piled atop her humanity and her misplaced glasses and a stack of long-lost friends she is terrified of accruing?

Gertrude did not care about people. Sasha does. There’s a balance to be found, if only she searches enough; if she takes a magnifying glass to every inch of the Archives’ history she is sure to find breadcrumbs leading her in the right direction. There are always clues. The answers to every question are  _ somewhere _ , if only one looks hard enough.

For now, lacking more concrete solutions, it is easy to think of those around her.

She spotted Tim’s favorite brand of mini chocolate croissants at the grocery store yesterday, and they’re tucked in her bag to bring to work today, surprise him with a bit of a gift. It’s easy to picture his eyes lighting up. They have  _ sprinkles _ on them, and Tim’s always had an unbearable sweet tooth.

There’s enough to share with Jon and Martin, too, if he wants. She thinks — though she doesn’t  _ Know _ , hasn’t gone prying into the trio’s business much as she is curious — that he might.

She doesn’t talk to the two of them as much as she does Tim, but they are, nonetheless, included in her list of  _ her people; _ her friends are few these days, and she will take what she can get. At the very least, she’s committed to protecting them. There’s enough dangers in this world, from the watching walls of the Archives themselves to worm-women and Strangers and so much else she has only read of, and she has one wary eye trained on them all, lest they come too close.

She hopes so, at least. She only has so much attention to divide between loved ones; only so much caution to spare. Logic tells her those in the Archives are the most vulnerable; god, Prentiss and Tim are proof enough of that, aren’t they? They all have the scars from those worms. 

But she cannot wave away her worry for those who aren’t within those walls; how many statements, after all, are about people who are entirely, heartbreakingly  _ normal _ until one entity or another ruins their life? Is her family safe for being a two-hour train ride away? It’s been a long time since she’s visited them; they’ve never been very close, and the trip hasn’t seemed quite worth the awkward silences it would result in for some years now, but they should, by all rights, be counted among those tethering her to humanity. Is her mother safe? Or is she a target for knowing Sasha and being too far for her to protect? 

It’s difficult, keeping her thoughts on track, these days. She spirals into catastrophizing more easily than not, but as she closes her apartment door behind her, she imagines her panic being left on the other side.  _ Click _ goes the lock.

There is a notebook page in her mind, college-ruled and color-coded and spiral-bound, letters scratched into the page listing all of those she loves. She puts an asterisk next to the bullet point reading  _ family. Call mom soon. _

Tim and Jon and Martin, her parents and her little brother. Old friends from uni who she hasn’t spoken to in  _ ages _ , but maybe they had enough of an impact in their day to be counted, anyways.

Of course, finally, she thinks of Melanie.

It’s one day away from their next date now. They’re getting  _ dinner _ , dinner on a Saturday; a veritable step-up from Thursday night happy hours. There’s a part of her that never quite let go of old fairytale notions of romance and hopes the restaurant is candlelit, with roses on the table; perhaps she could pluck a flower and tuck it behind Melanie’s ear. She’s been wanting to since first seeing Melanie, after all.

She floats on the idea of  _ dinner _ all the way to the tube station, leans against the wall of the platform with the morning rush crowds around her, and pulls her phone out to check the time.

Several texts from Tim haunt the screen, timestamped twenty minutes ago.

—  _ sasha _

_ — don’t come in today _

_ — i’m serious _

_ — idk what’s happening but theyre asking abt you and it seems bad _

Dread takes root in the pit of her stomach. She texts back:

— why? what’s going on? who’s asking about me????

There’s no reply by the time the train arrives, not even a checkmark to tell her that he’s read the messages, and her dread has sprouted into thick vines of panic that crawl up to squeeze tight around her lungs.

The train is in front of her.

She can hear the announcer’s voice from within, naming the  _ here _ and the  _ there _ in monotone,  _ mind the gap between the train and the platform _ and all, but she isn’t processing any of the words. They fade deep into the background of her racing thoughts.

Tim would tell her to go home. Wait until she heard back from him. Be smart, be patient.

Tim is, quite possibly, in massive danger. Something is happening at the Institute. That never means anything good, she knows that  _ so well _ by now; something could be attacking, something awful and monstrous and —

Tim has no idea just how powerful she is now. He probably thinks he’s protecting her, but she is the  _ only _ one who can protect him, protect  _ all of them. _

The doors are going to close any moment.

She makes a split-second decision and squeezes sideways through the doors before they have the chance. Her jacket snags on it and she gets some dirty looks from people having to reshuffle their comfortable posts in the crowd to accommodate an extra body; more as the door has to open and shut again to readjust for her intrusion. They’re all equally late to work, equally hurried, but not headed into the same amount of certain danger as she is, so she thinks it fair that she should get a pass to glare back. Just this once.

Sasha spends the train ride checking her phone obsessively, that gnawing vine in her ribcage turning to poison ivy that chokes her throat and makes it impossible to breathe the longer her phone tells her, in no uncertain terms,  _ No new messages. _

—————

The Institute is lit up in flashing blue.

There’s a crowd for a half-block around the building, standing tip-toed and peering over one another’s heads to get a glimpse of whatever tragedy has necessitated this many police cars and a handful of ambulances to boot, and Sasha’s breakneck sprint comes to a sudden halt at the back of the crowd, breathless, wide-eyed.

“What happened?” she asks the man next to her. He’s tall enough she has to crane her neck to look him in the eyes. Dark hair; scowl on his face that reminds her, momentarily, of Jon, which sends her thoughts spiraling down the path of naming every person in the Institute and hoping to all hell that they’re alright.

Sasha sees the static take hold and spill words from the man’s mouth. “Dunno, honestly. I work down the street a bit, was just passing here on my way — saw the crowds and the sirens and all that, thought there’d be somethin’  _ interesting _ — not that I  _ wanted _ there to be a crime or something, y’know — but so far it’s just been that old fucker talkin’ to the cops.” He nods towards the Institute’s steps, where Sasha can just see Elias Bouchard giving his best bootlicking smile to a policewoman.

Even with the compulsion, the man’s worse than unhelpful. He’s  _ dull _ . He keeps on rambling, and she turns back to the scene ahead and drowns him out. Sasha’s gaze turns sharp, searching for  _ anything _ that’ll give her a hint at what’s happening.

Elias’ sleeves are rolled up.

That strikes her as odd — it’s September, but it’s overcast, chilly, and she’s never seen him in anything less polished than a full suit. Before this moment, she wasn’t entirely convinced he  _ could _ be seen without a full suit, but here he is, jacketless and rolled-up shirtsleeves. No one else in the crowd would see this as odd, but she narrows in on him like a hawk, circling, circling.

He glances sideways at her.

She startles back into the person behind her, gets a  _ excuse me! _ , but he says nothing, just continues on in his amicable conversation with that smug look at his face, making direct eye contact with the Archivist over the cop’s shoulder all the while. He rolls down his left sleeve, then his right, and her eyes are zooming camera lenses, landing on the smallest speck of blood on his left cuff. It isn’t large enough for anyone to notice without the Eye’s assistance, but —

She notices. She was  _ meant _ to notice. He wanted her to notice.

The Eye informs her that it is fresh. The Eye tells her the name of the man it belongs to.

The Eye is rarely so forthcoming with anything remotely  _ helpful _ , but as she stands stock-still in the thinning crowd, it lets her know (oh-so-helpfully) that the man was found dead on the floor of her office, and as such, she is the primary suspect.

When the Institute’s wide double doors open and two bodies come wheeled out, their identities stick in her throat like a goddamn stone.

One, even shielded beneath its plastic tarp, is shaped wrong. She knows the form of it, that uncanniness emanating from it even in death; it calls out that it is  _ familiar _ , that she should  _ mourn _ for the loss of her dear friend, but she knows that to be a cruel joke. As if she had not taken a crowbar to its misshapen limbs and left it in the tunnels to  _ rot _ .

Just looking at it makes her nauseous, but the second body that emerges is no better. The thing that was never Tim was killed by her hand, and she does not regret it for a  _ moment _ . The second tarp hides a human body. He has the dusty air of the tunnels clinging to him after years spent in its depths and a thousand curses resting on his shoulders.

She Knows, instantly, that he was killed for giving her too much information.

As the thing that stole Tim’s face is loaded into the back of an ambulance alongside Jurgen Leitner, Sasha turns and runs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **content warnings:** spiraling panicky thoughts, dead bodies, mentions of blood/murder/police.
> 
> **up next:** a change in perspective.
> 
> thanks for your patience with this one! we're about halfway through right now; obviously this fic isn't following the podcast plot exactly, but this is sasha's season 2 finale. thanks so much for all the love on this; your comments are always so lovely to read, and even though i'm dreadful at responding to them, please know i appreciate every single one!
> 
> hmu on tumblr @ [dykivist!](http://dykivist.tumblr.com)

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! i'll be aiming to update this at least once a week.
> 
> hit me up on tumblr @ [dykivist](http://dykivist.tumblr.com)! leave a comment, let me know what you think!


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